This sentence DOES entail the past perfective (John had run in the
race).

One can also vary tense independent of lexical and grammatical aspect:
is winning, will be winning
is running, will be running

has won, will have won
has run, will have run

Of course, as Rolf notes, sometimes the term aspect is used to cover
lexical and grammatical aspect, as is Aktionsart. I agree, first
thing we do (is NOT kill all the lawyers, since I'm married to one),
is to separate tense (timen of an action/state), grammatical aspect
(view of an action/state) and lexical aspect (Aktionsart 'kind of
action(/state)')

********
Mari Broman Olsen
Research Associate

University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
3141 A.V. Williams Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742